


the whole damn meal

by Anonymous



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Crack, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gen, old vampires and technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25043755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He was getting to his feet, trying to put himself between Nandor and any intruders, when Nandor said, shoving Guillermo's phone into his chest, "I have been banned, unjustifiably, from your Instacart!"
Relationships: Guillermo de la Cruz & Nandor the Relentless
Comments: 21
Kudos: 49
Collections: Anonymous





	the whole damn meal

"Guillermo!" Nandor barged into Guillermo's room and Guillermo sat straight up in bed, trying to shove down visions of vampire assassins having broken into the house somehow and trying to take his--friends?--to their second deaths. "Guillermo!"

"What?" said Guillermo. He would have dived for the weapons under his mattress, but Nandor was too close. He couldn't risk a slip of the wrist, a stake flying out when he didn't mean it to and unerringly finding Nandor's heart. He was too good at killing vampires to take the chance that he could instinctively distinguish between the vampires he had to kill and the vampires he only sometimes wanted to kill.

He was getting to his feet, trying to put himself between Nandor and any intruders, when Nandor said, shoving Guillermo's phone into his chest, "I have been banned, unjustifiably, from your Instacart!"

"What." Guillermo slumped back on his bed and slipped the crucifix beneath his shirt. "I mean, what did you do?"

"Nothing!" cried Nandor. It had still been a mistake to give Nandor access to his phone, Guillermo reflected. What if he'd clicked on a phishing link and locked Guillermo out of his phone for the foreseeable future? It wasn't as if Guillermo could afford to buy a new one because it wasn't like he got paid for what he spent approximately twenty hours a day doing.

"Nothing," said Guillermo dubiously, unlocking his phone. It didn't freeze up, at least. And it didn't give him any dire warnings. In fact, if Nandor hadn't come wailing to him about it, and he hadn't gotten the confirmation from Instacart, he wouldn't have had any idea anything had gone wrong.

"How did that happen, exactly?" he asked Nandor, slipping the phone into his pocket. "You getting banned from Instacart?"

Nandor wrung his hands. "I don't know. Maybe we were hacked!"

"I don't think people hack into phones just to ban other people from Instacart," said Guillermo, and pulled the phone back out.

"Fine, fine. Perhaps it was because I was trying to use your account and you have a magic spell to tell who can and who cannot use your phone." Guillermo had set up facial recognition with Nandor, though. Not because he'd wanted to, just because he'd known it was easier than the alternative, and Nandor might have forgotten the passcode. Considering that the passcode was the date Guillermo had become his familiar, Nandor had almost definitely forgotten it.

"But you don't eat human food, mast--Nandor," he said, checking his phone. The ban from Instacart was at the top of his email. "Why would you be trying to use a grocery delivery service in the first place?"

Nandor went absolutely still. "We were hacked?" he tried again.

Guillermo raised both eyebrows, and waited.

"Fine," said Nandor, and crossed his arms. "It will spoil the surprise, but fine. I was going to make you the traditional Al Quolanudar first slaughter stew, and was ordering you the ingredients on your Intercart so I could surprise you with it instead of trying to get them all when we went shopping. It is hard to sneak a whole sheep into a shopping cart. Also they don't sell whole sheep at CVS. I called and checked."

"Oh." Guillermo was flattered. Bewildered, but flattered. "I, uh. Thank you. That's very thoughtful. I still don't understand why you got banned, though. Did you, ah. Happen to call the shopper some kind of slave or serf or peasant?"

"Of course not." Nandor flung himself down on Guillermo's bed, which really wasn't big enough for the two of them. "It is all robots these days, and you do not call a robot a slave or the robots will rise up against you and crush you. They have self-respect, unlike humans."

Guillermo kicked the stakes further under his bed. "Maybe it was the whole sheep," he said, although he was pretty sure you could get those in the outer boroughs. They'd just be hard to transport back. Maybe no one had picked up the order because of that, and Nandor had kept trying? That seemed kind of sweet, Nandor relentlessly re-submitting an order because he wanted to make a celebratory meal for Guillermo, even if it had ended up annoying Instacart enough to get him banned. "It's okay," he said, patting Nandor's shoulder soothingly. "It's the thought that counts." Especially because it had been long enough that Nandor had eaten human food that Guillermo really doubted he'd be able to prepare it. 

"But it was your first real slaughter!" said Nandor, his head hitting the wall. "We should have celebrated it properly. It is a great stew. I can still remember how it tasted after my first slaughter, when I was fourteen and fresh from battle. There was a lot of garlic, but I was going to use the gas mask and gloves you wear when you are dissolving bodies."

"There's poison on th-- you know what, it's a moot point. Now that the stew isn't a surprise, I can peel the garlic for you."

"I suppose," said Nandor. Oh, no. He was going to get Guillermo to cook his own celebratory stew. They didn't teach you how to butcher a whole sheep at Panera. Maybe it wouldn't be all that different from dismembering a human corpse? "You will like it, Guillermo. There is the sheep and the garlic, and the spinach and many onions, and also eggplants--"

"Eggplants," said Guillermo. The email from Instacart had talked about harassment, but he'd thought, with Nandor, it must have been more harrying than harassment. Laszlo would definitely have been lewd towards the Instacart shoppers, but Nandor-- "Master, how did you request these items? Did you browse and select, or did you send a list?"

"I sent a list," said Nandor. "I even used all the little pictographs in case the names have changed over the centuries. I was being very considerate."

"You sent the Instacart shopper an eggplant emoji."

"No," said Nandor. "I sent them seven eggplant emojis."

"Okay, I think I know what the problem is." Guillermo dialed customer support, and he didn't know if Nandor somehow hypnotized the hold queue or what, but he got put through to a representative almost immediately. "Yeah, it's about my account freeze? A friend of mine did that." The representative started chattering to him about something, but Guillermo missed all of what she was saying because Nandor had put his hand over Guillermo's, almost shyly, and Guillermo realized he'd just called Nandor a friend and Nandor hadn't yelled at him or stormed off, and that Nandor was smiling at him.

If Guillermo had known that all he had to do to earn Nandor's respect was commit mass murder, he'd have been a vampire ages ago.

"Yes, well, he was trying to be helpful," said Guillermo, trying to smile back at Nandor even though his heart was beating way too fast. "He's approximately seven hundred years old, he doesn't know what the eggplant emoji means."

"What does the eggplant emoji mean?" Nandor whispered, but loudly enough that the customer service representative heard him. She was saying something about her great-uncle now. But, and most importantly, she was saying she'd restore his account access. Guillermo promised he'd be the one ordering from now on. They exchanged the kind of meaningless pleasantries Guillermo had learned by heart while working at Panera, and hung up.

"Guillermo," whined Nandor, but he was still holding his hand, "what does the eggplant emoji mean?"

Guillermo took a deep breath. "Some people use it as a penis, Master."

"Oh," said Nandor. "I did not know you could order those online."

He was not going to explain dating apps to Nandor. There was no way that would end well. Laszlo would probably find out. Laszlo would definitely find out. "Not through Instacart. Here's, let look for the ingredients. Does it have to be a whole sheep, or can we order cuts of mutton?"

"How can we celebrate your becoming a warrior without an entire sheep?"

"Whole sheep it is," muttered Guillermo, but he found he was smiling anyway. Nandor hadn't let go of his hand once, and, when Guillermo got confirmation that the order had been picked up and would be delivered in a few hours, traffic permitting, Nandor wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug that filled Guillermo's mouth and nostrils briefly with the furs Nandor was wearing. The furs smelled a little like death, which wasn't the same as smelling like Ax bodyspray. More like something ancient, something old-fashioned, something like a long-boiled sheep and ten heads of garlic. Like what Nandor wanted to honor him with.

He definitely should have committed mass murder sooner.

**Author's Note:**

> About halfway through this I realized that Nandor has never eaten tomatoes or chocolate and now I have to write bodyswap fic to rectify that. /o\


End file.
